Spending The People’s Money

February 16, 2005
by Rob Lafferty

It’s hard to be sure if any politician is sincere when they speak, but the way that they spend the People’s money is a reliable measure.

A few highlights and lowlights of the unprecedented, $2.5 trillion, 2006 presidential budget proposal reveals some of the priorities of this administration:

President Bush wants to cut a $600 million grant program for local police departments to improve technology and communications with other agencies to $60 million – a 90 percent reduction in funding.

$715 million in grants to local firefighters would drop by almost one-third, to $500 million.

$300 million in funds to the states for jailing illegal aliens who commit crimes will be eliminated.

The Environmental Protection Agency funding would drop $450 million.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs – the same agency that would administer programs for Kanaka Maoli that are proposed in the Akaka bill – loses $100 million, mostly from school building programs.

$200 million will be cut from a program that provides low-income and elderly people with home-heating aid. Those folks did get a promise, however, that the government would be there when they need help next winter.

A food stamp cut is expected to be about $1 billion. Huge farm subsidy cuts are also part of the package.

Pell grants for the lowest-income students to attend college would be increased, but at the expense of the Perkins loan program for low and middle-income college students. That $6 billion loan program would be eliminated, along with another $1.2 billion for vocational programs.

Eighteen housing and community development programs would be consolidated – and then cut by 40 percent. The National Park Service budget would drop nearly 3 percent.

A preventative program aimed at obesity and other chronic diseases will be cut by 6.5 percent. Another to train doctors for children’s hospitals will be cut by one-third. Training for nurses, dentists and other health professionals will be reduced by 64 percent.

$1.2 billion in subsidies for Amtrak, the national passenger train service, will be terminated.

Just those few items listed above represent – at the very least – $23 billion of cuts in services to the taxpaying public. Other critical problems are not accounted for in any way, such as the estimated 9.2 million children currently without health insurance who get no direct help at all from this budget.

Meanwhile, the administration just asked for another $80 billion to continue the military occupation of Iraq. That money, along with almost all of the cost of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan is kept outside of this already massive fiscal budget. Their “war on terror” is being funded primarily by supplemental requests – an accounting version of the old shell game.

There’s been no public accounting of the hundreds of millions of dollars that Congress authorized for the futile search for non-existent weapons in Iraq, while the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency insists that their entire budget and expenditures will remain classified.

The US military is building permanent bases in Iraq, at an unknown cost, that implies a long-term plan for US soldiers to be stationed in Iraq. That cost is also unknown, but will be high in dollars and tragic in human lives.

And Defense Secretary Rumsfeld gets $10.3 million this year alone to resume a study of earth-penetrating nuclear weapons construction.

The above examples are just the tip of a massive, ugly iceberg of spending priorities that Vice-President Cheney calls “fair and reasonable”. It provides a clear picture of the “Crusade” this Bush administration wants to lead, here in the “New World Order” proclaimed by the first Bush administration.